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Calm Down, Internet -- Valve Isn't Building Their Own Steam Box

With the unveiling of SteamOS — a forked distribution of Linux dedicated to running the Steam platform in the living room — a vocal majority online is expecting Valve to follow up with the announcement of their own, branded “Steam Box” hardware. It’s not happening, it never will, and here’s why.

Prior to today’s announcement, it felt like every media outlet on earth was publishing articles with headlines like “Valve to unveil Steam Box on Monday!” I’m aware that Valve has two remaining announcements this week, but a Steam Box isn’t one of them.

The initial proof is right there in Valve’s introductory paragraph to SteamOS: “As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself.”

In terms of pushing Steam into the living room, Big Picture Mode was a tentative foot in the door, and SteamOS is a much more confident step. But it’s enthusiasts, boutique PC builders, and OEMs who will propel gamers through that door, not Valve themselves.

Linux is open source software, and Valve is billing SteamOS as a “cooperating system.” On their blog, Valve reiterates that designing hardware is not their long game: “With SteamOS, ‘openness’ means that the hardware industry can iterate in the living room at a much faster pace than they’ve been able to.”

What pace are they referring to? Well, we’ve seen a proliferation of small form factor gaming PCs such as the Tiki from Falcon Northwest and the Piston from Xi3. A dozen different case manufacturers are pushing new mini-ITX enclosures. But simply plugging a smaller computer into your TV is far from an elegant solution.

Putting a free operating system into the hands of creative hardware manufacturers and system integrators that focuses on Family Sharing, in-home streaming, and is explicitly designed from the ground up for use on a big screen? That’s a different animal entirely.

Valve’s platform and primary source of revenue is digital distribution. Even their own game franchises like Portal and Left 4 Dead are secondary. It’s in their best interest to enable developers to sell more games, and hardware makers to sell more hardware to play those games on.

Gabe Newell and company are staunch Linux advocates, and you can be assured that they’ve been hunkered down developing middleware and tools to aid publishers and developers in bringing their titles to Linux — and in turn SteamOS.

Right now SteamOS is dependent on Windows to stream a user’s entire Steam library to a so-called “Steam Box.” But mark my words: Valve’s long game is to erase Windows from the PC gaming equation entirely. To that end, it’s in their best interest to open up their toolbox to partners, not to create a closed ecosystem or hardware environment with their own branded box.

I’m willing to posit that yes, Valve has developed their own Steam Box — as a reference design only. This is common practice in the industry, and we’ve already seen it from companies like AMD and NvidiaNvidia as blueprints for integrating chipsets like Tegra 4 and APUs.

Everyone has also forgotten that Valve laid off a significant portion of their hardware design team earlier this year — probably because said reference design was near completion.

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Well the problem is you are basing yourself so much on their words that you forgot to think for yourself or even research the thing.

There is 2 more announcements, hints on those 2 announcements clearly indicate that some sort of hardware is planned for this OS.

And if you pause and think for a second, unless you just assume Valve are stupid, they would crazy not to release some kind of hardware to push the adoption of this OS.

This is almost a given, the second announcement will be the SteamBox, the only real question is will the 3rd one a new Source engine made with Linux in mind or… Half-Life 3, hint: it’s never Half-Life 3.

I’d be willing to bet that we will see at least two third party electronics giants producing a couple of Steam Boxes for around $600 (a la the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer) within the next 18 months.

The real reason you won’t see a Steam Box from Valve is that if it’s ever going to be mass produced at a low price it’s going to be an extremely low margin product. Give Valve’s lack of experience mass producing low-margin electronics they would probably have to take a loss, and it’s simply not in their interest to do that.

Or not. Valve has filed three different trademarks for ” Interactive video game devices comprised of computer hardware and software and accessories, namely, game consoles, game controllers and software for operating game controllers…” with the USPTO since Sept. 8. You don’t file trademarks for reference designs.

If there isn’t going to be a form of dedicated hardware to help push adoption rates I can’t see this going anywhere. 1000 dollar, devices like the xi3 Piston won’t cut it if your planning on competing with 400-500 dollar devices that strive for ease of access.

They need a device cheap enough to compete that instantly launches into a steam UI from the start up and is ready to just play games.

Newell already claimed Valve is working on it’s own hardware in the past. http://kotaku.com/5966860/gabe-newell-living-room-pcs-will-compete-with-next+gen-consoles

I’m predicting a dedicated box and some other sort of streaming device.

This is an in depth article that analyzes Valve’s words and actions recently and from the past. With Valve’s reputation of always keeping pertinant information from its consumer market anyone who has the time to provide a little light what might be the company’s future deserves a little respect.

The writer has already proven himself adept at providing the masses with information about current trends in technology (my favorite being hardware). So he might know a thing or two about the industry.

Since that’s now settled. Let’s move on.

Trolls? Really? Not worth my time to write about.

Now wether Linux is an operation system or not isnt the case of this article. You actually missed the whole point if all you took from this article was that statement. To the veternans this might have come across as interesting, but even then not the point. Its easier to refer to the operation system as a Linux platform, because the majority of the target audience isn’t fluent in the languages/operating system functionality and history.

The Steambox Although it would be absolutly interesting and spectacular to see Valve release the “steambox” how well do you think it would interest anyone else who DOES NOT use a PC for gaming? Valve’s expertise and experience comes from distributing gaming and attending to the needs of its PC/Mac gamers, but when it comes to the living room/console gamers most of them are not interested. Even with Steam’s big picture I do not know anyone who has a dedicated PC/Mac connected to their living room. It’s nice and pretty, but not a selling point. So what to do? How about go about to the drawing board, revolutionize the gaming UI, and let hardware developers have a field day. Imagine, Anyone who offered customized PC will be creating small form factor PCs (as stated in this article). They will be created many different mini consoles that all run the same program. The public will have OPTIONS when it comes to system specs. Bascially an army of new consoles. No more waiting for the next PS or Xbox only to have it run subpar performances. We could have had wifi a long time ago in our consoles if we didn’t wait around for them to decide on it. The biggest selling point for customers would be the price they could obtain these options for. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo (still include for purpose of this argument) run the show in the console war. Now introduce Nvidia, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Asus, Lenovo, Maingear, etc. You now have more competitors than you can count knocking on your front door letting you know they just moved into the neighborhood. What does this mean. Well when you have competitors, the price almost always goes down.

That being said I think I’ll stop here. See what happen when you make me read your dirty comments through my phone?

Also I would gladly pay more than Xbox One’s price to have a mini console created by Nvidia running steamOS…. It would be… Beautiful.

You don’t present a very convincing argument. Sure you could be right but without hard evidence I’m gonna have to invoke Occam’s Razor. They said they’re working on it, been saying it for a while. Back in March he even said they’re going to start releasing prototypes (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21677119). And now, here they are, about to unveil something big about bring Steam to the living room. If I’m to make an assumption that this project’s been cancelled, I’ll need something more substantial than layoffs. Steambox and SteamOS are NOT mutually exclusive and never have been. They can still make their own while simultaneously working to help others to make theirs. Whether or not that’s in their best interests is another story. Steam had its naysayers. Of course, so did PowerPlay.

That being said I have no faith in an OS-only solution, Linux has games like I have Bentleys, if their intent is to convert Windows gamers to Linux gamers they would need dogged support for games ported to or made on their OS, and Linux isn’t known for being the most friendly gaming platform.